Photophobia is so characteristic of migraine that it forms part of the diagnostic criteria. Ordinary daylight becomes intolerable. A phone screen feels like a searchlight….
neckwise
For a large proportion of people with migraine, nausea is the worst part. The head pain is severe, but the nausea is what makes an attack unbearable — and it is what makes oral…
Of every headache location, this is the one where the anatomy points most directly at the upper cervical spine. Pain at the base of the skull sits over the suboccipital region —…
Retro-orbital pain is one of the most common headache descriptions and one of the most misleading. Patients feel it inside the socket — pressure behind the globe, as though the…
The word migraine descends from hemicrania — half the head. One-sidedness has been considered the signature of the condition for as long as it has had a name, and the…
Aura is the strangest part of migraine and the part patients describe most vividly. A shimmering arc at the edge of vision that grows over twenty minutes. A blind spot with a…
Jaw and head pain share the trigeminal nerve. Why treating one without the other so often plateaus.
Thunderclap onset is the line. What a sentinel headache is and why the one that eases is the dangerous one.
Gradual spread versus sudden onset, positive versus negative symptoms – and why any doubt means calling emergency services.
A set of questions to work through, and why ‘both’ is the most common and most useful answer.